This is the week my college cronies and I used to convene at that beach house I keep nattering on about. We settled on this schedule where we ate most dinners at the house and each of us played to their strengths. One night the person who loved to grill made steaks and chicken; my night was always a Festa Italiana; the one person who was unsure of her cooking skills was the sous chef; the couple with children made delicious, homey comfort food meals. One of the participants worked as a line cook at a diner in college so he would whip up these enormous breakfasts when the whim struck. My additional duties included running the blender for the copious rum drinks and being the scorekeeper for the competitive-level card games that the others liked to play after dinner and were very serious about. Midweek we’d be joined by a couple who couldn’t get enough time off to invest seven days in these shenanigans and they always made a fruit pizza (and brought enough box wine to keep us afloat long after they had departed.)
Fruit pizza is a perfect communal summer dessert. I found this recipe on the Pillsbury website (they have more than one) and will share. You obviously choose what kind of fruit to go on the pizza, but the header pic shows you how lovely this can be in its presentation. It is somewhat surprisingly lacking in strawberries, and needless to say a fruit pizza is an excellent use for them.
1 crust from 1 box (14.1 oz) refrigerated Pillsbury™ Pie Crusts (2 Count), softened as directed on box
1 package (8 oz) cream cheese, softened
2 tablespoons milk
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon grated orange peel
2 to 3 cups assorted cut-up fresh fruit
Heat oven to 450°F. [Make sure you’ve got that rented beach house a/c cranked!] Remove crust from pouch; unroll on ungreased cookie sheet. Flute edge, if desired. Generously prick crust with fork. Bake 9 to 11 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool completely, about 30 minutes.
In small bowl, beat cream cheese, milk, powdered sugar and orange peel with electric mixer on medium speed until smooth. Place cooled baked crust on serving plate; spread with cream cheese mixture to within 1/2 inch of edge. Arrange fruit on cream cheese mixture. Store in refrigerator.
Since you’re not doing this at a rented beach house you might have a handy pizza pan, so use that if you want, that’s what I do. Also, what the couple at the beach house did is use a roll of cookie dough and made a kind of flatbread pizza, and then you can serve it in squares.
“Just Like Homemade!” Ice Cream Sandwiches
Shockingly, Andrew Cuomo’s former concubine Sandra Lee did not provide me with this “recipe”: I came up with the concept one year at the beach house, but it probably is centuries old.
Buy a bunch of large bakery cookies, sugar cookies or chocolate ones, but nothing complicated, like chocolate chip cookies. Spead a good amount of slightly softened ice cream over half of them and top with the remaining cookies. Freeze them for about an hour or so. Some good combos are sugar cookies with Neapolitan ice cream and chocolate cookies with strawberry or peach ice cream.
All desserts are good desserts; that one sure looks pretty!
If you make a large rectangular one, that’s what the couple in the beach house used to make, with chocolate chip cookie dough, you can go wild with the fruit topping designs. One of them was in the Navy and knew Morse Code, so the first time, of many times, he sliced up (this sounds absolutely crazy but it used to get to 100° F in that beach area and 100% humidity and we were all so drunk, so very, very drunk) little raspberries and blueberries to represent dots and sliced peaches and bananas to represent dashes.
He challenged us to guess what the design meant. I’m a Pisces so I’m destined to be a little psychic (I don’t really believe in astrology, but I do pick up clues and see connections where others might not) so I said, “I was in the Boy Scouts and I think that’s Morse Code.” Why Boy Scouts in the early 70s were learning Morse Code is beyond me, but we were also taught how to use a ham radio. Our Scoutmaster was a grizzled WW2 vet and survived Okinawa so maybe he thought we, like he, might someday find ourselves under Japanese attack and these would be useful skills.
Anyway, he said, yes, it was Morse Code, and since I learned it, what does it say? “I don’t know, I don’t remember any of it, but I do remember we were taught this phrase, I think it’s from the Bible, it’s famous in Morse Code for some reason–” and another beach house member jumped in and stole my thunder and scream-slurred, “What hath God wrought!” And she was right, she was the winner. And then he dumped tons more fruit on the “pizza” and we ate it, ravenously.
Not to be outdone, the following year, so that would have been the second Year of the Fruit Pizza, was the summer of 1998, and we were still all suffering from Titanic mania. It was still showing in theaters. I said to Better Half, who avoided these beach vacays like the plague because there was so much shared communal college memory that our conversations would have been unintelligible to someone Who Had To Be There to get all the jokes and references…I said to Better Half, “If X does that Morse Code trick again I think I’m ready for him. I looked this up on the World Wide Web at work (we did not have online access at home, not even AOL) and the last message sent from the Titanic was Morse Code and it went something like, ‘Come as quickly as you can, old man’ and–something abut sinking. Taking on water.”
And guess who won the Fruit Pizza Contest that year? Yours truly, thank you very much.
Yes, more desserts! Satan, come into me!
Your dentist will thank me. I’ll expect my usual 10% commission.
I know big chocolate chip cookies work fine, but I’m a little surprised Keebler or Nabisco or whoever hasn’t marketed chocolate cookies the same size as traditional ice cream sandwich cookies specifically for this. Or maybe they do and I just never noticed.
If you don’t feel like baking, you can make a cold cake like I used to get in Belize.
You need a baking dish like a 9×9 or 8×11 really anything will work. Shortbread cookies/graham crackers/vanilla wafers, something like that. A can of Nestlé media crema, 4 tbsp sugar, 2 tbsp butter, and a can of fruit cocktail or fresh fruit.
Crumble up shortbread cookies for the base. Place in bottom of dish for the base layer.
Beat sugar and butter until smooth and add crema. Layer this over your shortbread cookie base.
Top with the drained fruit cocktail or whatever fruit you want.
Put in fridge overnight. Enjoy!